The trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin
1922-85

A walnut tree in sunlight

A poem

Trees are poems
That earth writes upon the sky
We fell them down
And turn them into paper
That we may record our emptiness

Khalil Ghibran

Taken from BBC Radio 4. "Something understood" The Tree of Life"